Explanatory Economies

My contribution begins at an apparent historical and disciplinary distance, at least twice removed from this book’s concern with the role of ethnographic explanation in current anthropology. In the late nineteenth century the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach helped initiate critiques of the mechanical worldview with its reductionist, atomistic approaches to physics, which he described in 1871 as being so widely held that standing against them risked putting oneself out of step with modern culture (Mach [1872] 1911, 38–39).⁴ Mach advanced specific critiques while articulating an extremely general stance against what had proved a highly successful intellectual program (which was also based strongly on the material advances of steam engines, thermodynamics, and power generation). It will be helpful to think briefly about his work now, both because, like several authors in this book, Mach was arguing against a form of explanatory foundationalism and because his strategies became important outside physics, even in some cases for anthropology.

Mach was certainly not arguing against all elements of the mechanical worldview. He had begun his work as an atomist and initially accepted common hierarchical treatments that depicted physics as applied mechanics and biology as applied physics: an explanatory hierarchy of the sciences. Celebrating the social physics of Adolphe Quetelet for its statistical regularities, he also sought an exact psychology in research stimulated by Gustav Fechner’s studies of psychophysics, aiming to bridge the cleft between inner and outer (Mach 1863; Staley 2021). But by 1871 Mach pursued the limits of mechanics from two sides. On the one hand, he argued that insights often described as the fruit of the mechanical account of heat actually had a much broader foundation in understandings of causality. They were more general than mechanics. Revealingly, Mach thought the idea that a cause determines the effect may have been known in full clearness “at a very low stage in human culture.” He argued a higher stage of knowledge is distinguished not by a difference in the conception of causality but by the manner in which it is applied (Mach [1872] 1911, 63–64).

Mach’s view that the form of thought underlying scientific work was shared in other realms was important to his understanding of the relations between different disciplines. He argued the concept of soul is an abstraction of the same kind as the concept of matter. Considering the fields most relevant to his own early research on visual, aural, and bodily perception and motion, Mach regarded physics, physiology, and psychology as approaching the same phenomena from different perspectives. He thought mechanical approaches were considered more fundamental and intelligible than others largely because the history of mechanics was older and richer than other fields, but over time thermal or electrical approaches might come to have this status. Thus what appeared to be more fundamental depended on custom and history. In 1883 Mach took this historical, “anthropological” approach to the status of current science to the extent of critiquing the medieval basis for Isaac Newton’s discussions of absolutes, citing E. B. Tylor in arguing that traces of fetishism were retained in current conceptions of forces (Mach 1883, 435; [1883] 1960, 558; Tylor 1873, 160, 183).

Apart from arguing all scientific thought rests on abstraction and analogy, Mach also argued science chiefly concerns the convenience and saving of thought: it is economical. In 1871, for example, he described the value of the law of fall as lying in the convenience of its use, its economic value as a synoptical aggregate of individual facts. A second scientific problem of an economic nature was the question of resolving complicated facts into as few and as simple facts as possible. This was what counted as an explanation. In a striking formulation, he described the process as one of tracing uncommon unintelligibilities back to common unintelligibilities—facts that are not further resolvable, such as the acceleration of one mass toward another. Thus what counts as fundamental is on the one hand an economical question and on the other hand a matter of taste. Mach noted he had maintained this view since he began teaching in 1861 but had also met it through the Viennese political economist Emanuel Herrmann (Mach [1872] 1911, 55, 88). It went along with his understanding that causal phenomena expressed simply the functional dependence of one phenomenon on another. Later Mach elaborated this account in an 1882 public lecture on the economy of science and a concluding section of his major 1883 study of mechanics, maintaining that the goal of physical science was the simplest and most economical description of appearances, and arguing further that with the knowledge of its economic character, all mysticism disappeared from science (Mach [1882] 1898; 1883, 452–453). Described as descriptionism, the approach has been regarded as characteristic of fin de siècle physics (see Heilbron 1982; Porter 1994; Staley 2008).

Mach’s economies insisted on new precision about particulars such as mass, time, and space but were deflationary about general aims. His arguments against the foundational status of physics and mechanics were advanced in both The Science of Mechanics and his Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations in 1886 (Mach 1883, 1886, [1890] 1897). Collectively these books were influential in shaping perspectives on the position of psychology as a science (in contrast, the leading exponent of laboratory-based experimental psychology, Wilhelm Wundt, had argued for the preeminence of motion in the causal structure of the sciences), as well as in arguments for the social sciences that stressed the significance of scientific method in the United States (Boring 1957, chap. 18; Danziger 1979; Porter 1994). And Mach’s views were also central in shaping the early work of Bronislaw Malinowski.

Trained in mathematics and physics, the young Polish scientist finished his doctoral dissertation on the principle of economy in science in 1906. Malinowski followed Mach in regarding the concept of function as the primary scientific tool, expressing the interrelations and mutual interdependence of phenomena (Malinowski [1906] 1993, 94; Young 2004). Mach had also offered the most satisfactory formulation of the principle of economy, on the borderland between scientific methodology and cognitive theory, but Malinowski drew on Richard Avenarius in pointing to a tension between psychological and sociological approaches he thought Mach had not addressed fully (Malinowski [1906] 1993, 104, 112–113). Arguing science was a collective social process that did not depend on the psychological insight of the typical, normal man, or a plebiscite of mankind, Malinowski (like Mach) regarded the economy of science to express an adaptation of thoughts to facts, but pressed still more insistently that it could be justified objectively: “If we treat science from the standpoint of its practical, as it were, biological significance to the individual, and not from a theoretical-comparative standpoint, we are able to assume the physical definition of its laws” (Malinowski [1906] 1993, 112).

Robert Thornton and Peter Skalník’s extensive introduction to The Early Writings of Bronislaw Malinowski argues persuasively for Mach’s significance to Malinowski (with Friedrich Nietzsche), but this phase of his work is rarely considered closely in discussing Malinowski’s treatment of economic issues in the Trobriands—usually regarded as the founding moments of economic anthropology (Thornton and Skalník 1993; see also Firth 1957, 212–214).⁵ But my study will have suggested two important points. First, Malinowski’s functionalism and treatments of economics elaborated on concepts he had first encountered as a student. Admittedly they were transformed radically in the different contexts of anthropological explanations of behavior and social institutions, or accounts of gift exchange and trade, but this was also in accord with Mach’s refusal to see major distinctions between different kinds of thought. Malinowski showed a similar readiness to move across disciplines. Having finished his dissertation in Krakow, Malinowski traveled first to Leipzig, studying with the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt and economic historian Karl Bücher, and then to the London School of Economics, where he began studies in sociology and anthropology. Malinowski’s early works bear clear traces of these moves, and often arc back to his earliest interests with continual references to the physicist in Argonauts of the Western Pacific, for example. As well as noting the long-standing nature of his concern with function and economy, my second major point about Malinowski’s dissertation is that these concepts were strongly associated with epistemology, and the borders between method and cognitive theory.

Both these features are evident in the gradual development of his treatments of economic issues. In 1913 Malinowski published an account of economic aspects of the intichiuma ceremonies of central Australia, which he knew from the work of Baldwin Spencer, F. J. Gillen, and Carl Strehlow, and addressed in order to combat the views of Sir James Frazer (Malinowski [1912] 1993). Focusing on the division of labor expressed in totemic systems, Frazer had argued that being engaged in magic had rendered barren what might otherwise have flowed from an inevitably fruitful economic principle. Malinowski’s counter was to explore relations between magic, religion, and economics in the social organization of the ceremonies, the collective effort they involved, and the practical aim they expressed of increasing numbers of a species. He also offered an account of the aims of theoretical ethnography, which he explicitly stated were like those of theoretical physics and chemistry. Each involved the exact description of the results of field research and observation, and “the province of theory … is to afford exact concepts, discuss and analyze observed connections of facts, and foresee new ones” (Malinowski [1912] 1993, 224).⁶ Accordingly Malinowski engaged in a careful analysis of concepts of economy and magic (which he treated as a form of primitive technique), in order to propose new interrelations between them. While eschewing any universal evolutionary system, Malinowski did suggest that the mix of magical and rational elements in the mutual engagement of magic and economic concerns was a pathway to increasingly rational approaches, significant for the evolution of economics.⁷ A year later he took up related concerns with property rights, division of labor, and the relations between family household and economic organization in his sociological study The Family among the Australian Aborigines (Malinowski 1913).

Economic Anthropology, the Economic Theorist, and “the Prevalent Mores of Social Discussion”

Malinowski’s next major work on economic issues was published in the Economical Journal in 1921, drawing on the extensive fieldwork in the Trobriands that also formed the basis for Argonauts of the Western Pacific in 1922. Malinowski saw little precedent for his anthropological study of economic issues and critiqued Bücher’s work in particular, arguing deficient materials had led Bücher to conclude savages were in a pre-economic stage. Among Trobriand Islanders, in contrast, Malinowski discerned distinct forms of economic organization. His study of land tenure showed Trobriand concepts of ownership involved several distinct legal and economic relationships different from Western ones, with the chief and garden magician each holding overrights to land belonging to individuals, and diverse stages in preparation and growing being marked by magical ceremonies controlling the forces of nature and the work of man. If economic production showed such rich interrelations, Malinowski was also now far more concerned to disabuse readers of the thought that natives required outside pressure to offer sustained and efficient labor—either individually or working communally on different scales from household to village. A similarly complex social organization was evident in canoe and house building and fishing, and Malinowski showed that what could be called the “financialization” of tribal life was bound up with chiefly power and displays of wealth, and governed by gift and countergift organized by kin and in-law relationships, as well as by dues and tributes to the chief. Malinowski thus argued that economic concerns thoroughly pervaded social life: wherever a native moved, whether to a feast, in expedition, or in warfare, they would deal with the problems of gift and countergift. But in his short article Malinowski refrained from going into the kind of detail he did in Argonauts, in order to focus more clearly on the public economy of the tribe, with some major tribal events offering examples and an extended discussion of exchange (and brief reference to the Kula ring) showing that, despite the prevalence of trade, nothing like money existed in the Trobriands.

In conclusion, Malinowski stated that the new conception he had outlined needed a new term and chose one (that had occasionally been used earlier): “Tribal Economy.” He developed the term in clear contrast to common understandings of both primitive and Western economics, and it is worth quoting his discussion at some length, partly to display the contracted form in which Malinowski deployed these contrasts, with their several, specific elements. Malinowski wrote,

In savage societies national economy certainly does not exist, if we mean by the term a system of free competitive exchange of goods and services, with the interplay of supply and demand determining value and regulating all economic life. But there is a long step between this and Buecher’s assumption that the only alternative is a pre-economic stage, where an individual person or a single household satisfy their primary wants as best they can, without any more elaborate mechanism than division of labour according to sex, and an occasional spasmodic bit of barter. Instead, we find a state of affairs where production, exchange and consumption are socially organized and regulated by custom, and where a special system of traditional values governs their activities and spurs them on to efforts. (1921, 15)

In this paper, addressed to economists, Malinowski called for further economic research into native conceptions, in the spirit of wide comparison and sharp contrast. Refusing to generalize from one sample, Malinowski thought further comparative work might offer interesting results capable of refreshing and fertilizing theory, writing, “We might be able to grasp the nature of the economic mechanism of savage life, and incidentally we might be able to answer many questions referring to the origins and development of economic institutions” (12).

We should note both the novelty of Malinowski’s conceptual strategy and his incidental conservativism. The significance of his extension of the meaning of economics can be highlighted by noting that in a study of risk and uncertainty in the same year, the Iowa (later University of Chicago) economist Frank Knight defined economics in terms of free enterprise, writing, “Economics is the study of a particular form of organization of human want-satisfying activity which has become prevalent in Western nations and spread over the greater part of the field of conduct. It is called free enterprise or the competitive system. It is obviously not at all completely or perfectly competitive, but just as indisputably its general principles are those of free competition” ([1921] 1933, 9).

Like Malinowski, Knight used a comparison with physics—but specifically with theoretical mechanics—to develop an understanding of theoretical economics. He emphasized the importance of general principles to economics and, as Mach may have (but to different effect), stressed the need to recognize the assumptions underlying their application to complex facts. Neglecting this had hampered economic theorists making untenable deductions, often of vicious character, which naturally harmed the credibility of theory. Knight thought it imperative that “the contrast between these simplified assumptions and the complex facts of life be made as conspicuous and as familiar as has been done in mechanics” ([1921] 1933, 9).⁸

Malinowski’s argument for a different kind of economics was novel. More conservatively, he assumed a continuity of institutions oriented toward explaining the origins and development of Western economic life, and wrote of refreshing theory rather than critiquing Western understandings of its own economic activities. Nevertheless, addressing an anthropological readership in Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Malinowski sharpened his perspective on Western economics by criticizing the assumption of “Primitive Economic Man,” a “fanciful, dummy creature” he thought featured in current economic textbooks, ran through its popular and semipopular literature, and also haunted the work of anthropologists. Attempting to explode the notion once and for all, Malinowski contrasted the assumed rationalistic self-interest of this imaginary savage with the complex aims and motives of Trobriand gardeners, with their ostentatious displays of produce that fed their sisters’ families, not their own, and their pride in good work (Malinowski [1922] 1961, 60–62, 96; see also Firth 1957, 217). This provided a foil for an extended treatment of complex social systems, and Malinowski offered a nuanced portrait of the imagined savage as a didactic device used to illustrate deductions actually based on work in developed economics.⁹ But his discussion has been interpreted as a problematic legacy, encouraging other anthropologists to work as he is thought to have, deriving their knowledge from sociology and general reading rather than close engagement with current economic thought. At least, this is the perspective Edward LeClair and Harold Schneider present looking back in 1968 (drawing also on aspects of Raymond Firth’s much more comprehensive appreciation) (LeClair and Schneider 1968, 3–5; Firth 1957, 211–212). In his 1940 book The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples, Melville Herskovits (37–38) offered a more sympathetic perspective, suggesting that Malinowski and other pioneers had not presented economics as an economist would, because of their emphasis on the cultural setting of economic data.

Like Malinowski, Herskovits lamented earlier neglect of economic subtlety, working to establish economic anthropology as a distinct subfield by drawing together the detailed but dispersed anthropological studies of Malinowski, Firth on Maori economics in 1929, Audrey Richards’s 1932 study of food in a South African tribe, and others (Herskovits 1940, 37–38). Yet Herskovits himself was savaged for precisely the same fault of economic naïveté by Knight—who nevertheless admitted “the errors and prejudices of this book are an integral part of the prevalent mores of social discussion” (Knight 1941, 268). This highlights an important point central to the aims of this chapter. Despite the justified concern of the specialist anthropologist or economist to argue against caricature, for the social commentator of the day (or the historian looking back), responding to prevalent mores or what counts as a discipline may be just as important as fidelity to more sophisticated disciplinary knowledge. The charges of disciplinary naïveté that have followed Malinowski and the authors of other early works in economic anthropology are in part surely costs of their originality of endeavor. Yet they have been brought from both sides often and long enough to have become a consistent trope. Notably, they run through the debates between “formalists” accepting conventional economic thought and “substantivists” who followed the work of Karl Polanyi in regarding premarket economies to reflect socially embedded relationships of reciprocity and communal redistribution, and who have often been attacked as Malinowski and Herskovits were. The naïveté charge therefore reflects at the same time arguments in the consolidation of particular fields of expertise and interpretive approaches, and significant perspectives on the relations between specialist and lay knowledge. “You say marketize, we say organize!” went protest chants outside Great St. Mary’s Church, and that is surely a slogan—but students from the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge also held up placards featuring Meyer Fortes, Polanyi, and Appadurai and reading, “Standing together against pension cut is one of our FORTES,” “POLANYI cut pension NOT a GREAT TRANSFORMATION,” “PROVOKED BY YOUR ECONOMISIN’,” and “CUSAS SOLIDARITY APPA-DO-RIGHT BY OUR STAFF.”

Mechanisms and the Economy

A second reason for paying close attention to Malinowski’s condensed discussion of tribal and developed economics is the assumptions it reveals about national economy, and its use of the metaphor of mechanism—both features that may point to particularities of the period in which he wrote, and which will help us approach Gregory’s interest in the historical foundations for our understanding of the market mechanism. Before considering their interrelations, it will be helpful to note that Gregory himself had paid close attention to the period in the nineteenth century in which concepts of political economy had been followed by the marginal revolution, without examining the period in the 1920s and 1930s.¹⁰ The work of Timothy Mitchell suggests some avenues through which this might be approached. Mitchell has argued that while terms like national economy and models of the economy had been advanced since the work of Adam Smith at least, it is distinctive that through the course of the nineteenth century these had always been regarded as political economies of management and public administration. Otherwise the primary reference of economy was to household stewardship. In his view it was only in the course of the 1920s and 1930s and especially after the Great Depression that it became possible to think in the English language of the general concept of the economy, or as Malinowski puts it here, of “national economy” as a bounded and comprehensive entity in which critically all economic life is regulated by supply and demand.

Mitchell argues that this possibility came from the work of Keynes and others managing the circulation of money in the bounded geographical space of colonial India, which he argues led them to refer to the economy as “a self-contained mechanism whose internal parts are imagined to move in a dynamic and regular interaction, separate from the irregular interaction of the mechanism as a whole with what could now be called its exterior” (Mitchell 2002, 82; 2005). Linguistically, Mitchell draws support from the way Georg Simmel described markets and money in his turn-of-the-century account of the city. Simmel consistently wrote in the qualified plural of metropolitan markets and the particular singular of a money economy. It was only in 1950 that his English-language translators Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills rendered the latter more general as the money economy (Mitchell 2002, 81–82). Simmel thought that, under primitive conditions, production had been bound in intimate personal relations, but modern cities were supplied by production for the market, and this enhanced the intellectualistic and abstract mentality characteristic of natural science (Simmel [1903] 2007, 184–185). But there is also support for Mitchell’s argument closer to home in Daniel Hirschman’s (2016) account of the rise of national statistics and gross domestic product in the 1930s, quantifying the economic sphere; and from Jon Agar’s (2003, chap. 6) historical work on early computing, which shows that mechanism was the governing metaphor for British government, and that in the 1920s and 1930s in particular a movement of expert “mechanizers” helped secure Treasury control over the Civil Service through what they described as the mechanization of the treatment of records, tasks, and files.

This was a period in which concepts of the machine, mechanism, and mechanization proliferated to run through social and intellectual life, as well as the reservoirs, gears, and armatures of heat engines and electricity generators, and extended to encompass the city as well as the factory (Staley 2018). Both Knight and Malinowski referred to mechanics and mechanism, but we should note that while Malinowski took care to outline why he called garden magic a “system,” he refers to the division of labor as a “mechanism” and to the “economic mechanism” of savage life without particular comment.¹¹ In the essay on the gift Marcel Mauss published in 1923–24, he argued it was only recently that Western societies had made man an “economic animal,” noting that many in the West are still not members of the genus and writing, “Homo oeconomicus is not behind us but lies ahead, as does the man of morality and duty, the man of science and reason. For a very long time man was different, and he has not been a machine for very long, made complicated by a calculating machine” ([1950] 2000, 76). Writing in 1940, Herskovits preceded his comparative discussions of specific aspects of economic activity with an introductory chapter on life “before the machine,” making the point that most of the world’s population still lived without machines and outlining the varied effects of industrial processes in a machine society. Yet outlining the specific terms in which the economist Friedrich Hayek articulated his concept of the free-market economy will indicate that considerable conceptual work was involved in achieving a form of persuasive generality about the economy—and this depended critically on a very particular use of a concept of mechanism.

It is important to note first that historians have shown that in the postwar period, debates about economic planning and freedom stimulated by the significant national management of wartime resources had involved considerable common ground for most of their participants. Neoliberals like Hayek (working first in Vienna and from 1931 at the London School of Economics) and the Chicago-trained Herbert Simon were suspicious of the moral failures of nineteenth-century capitalism and liberalism, endorsed significant government regulation, and shared values with socialists, while many economists used models of socialism and of markets hand in hand methodologically (Bockman 2011; Jackson 2010). In a 1937 article, Hayek shifted from thinking about markets in terms of the flow of goods to the question of information, and identified the critical problem that equilibrium theories of the perfect market had to encompass the markets of all the individual commodities. As Hayek put a point to which Malinowski had gestured, “The whole economic system must be assumed to be one perfect market in which everybody knows everything” (and we might note that although Malinowski thought his informants often showed the insight of a scientist, antiquarian, or sociologist, he insisted only the anthropologist fully understood the Kula trade ring) (von Hayek 1937, 44–45; Malinowski [1925] 1974, 34–35). Hayek now began to describe the division of knowledge as the central problem of economics as a science, perhaps even more significant than the division of labor, and questioned how individuals would acquire the knowledge required of the perfect market (having, himself, little faith in expert planning).

Hayek found his solution in “the price system” only in 1945, a year after he had made his intellectual and propagandistic break with socialism thoroughly complete in The Road to Serfdom, where his arguments against socialism within the West were now fueled by the conviction that socialism led inevitably to totalitarianism. Having long argued that planners should never be thought to be in a better position to make value judgments than individuals in the market, Hayek now described how consumers react to the changing price of tin to save and direct resources elsewhere even without knowing why the metal was scarce. He argued limited individual fields of vision overlapped enough to pass on the information, allowing the economy to operate as one system, with the whole acting as one market, writing, “It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement” (1945, 521).

The terms in which Hayek expresses his confidence in prices as the market mechanism illustrate some of the limitations of his solution. Historians have stressed that Hayek naturalized the market from this point, while critics might doubt whether it really is more than a metaphor (Caldwell 2004; Mirowski 2007). But these terms also highlight significant features of economics in this period. First, Hayek’s initial caution and later confidence confirm the pertinence and historical specificity of Mitchell’s argument about the gradual rise of the general concept of the economy only from the 1920s. In the similar grounds but clear contrasts between Knight’s general but theoretical principles of economics, Malinowski’s careful introduction of a new kind of economy, and Hayek’s insistence that the whole economic system must function as a perfect market, we can see that quite subtle distinctions were highly important to technical treatments of concepts of the economy in this period, and these were changing.

Yet a distinctly different use of concepts is evident in Hayek’s reference to machinery, another term that featured in the discussions of both anthropologists and economists, who shifted its metaphorical weight in diverse invocations. In particular, while Knight used a tight analogy with theoretical mechanics as an explanatory strategy, Malinowski and Hayek both paired their careful thought on the economy with more allusive references to mechanisms and machinery. Other scholars have emphasized that anthropologists and economists sought to clarify or gain disciplinary ground in their articulation of strong perspectives on Homo economicus or the primitive. Yet at the same time each also drew on less clearly articulated, shared assumptions about the rise of machine society and social mechanisms. I suggest that these functioned performatively, borrowing on what Knight called “prevalent mores of social discussion” to help shape a more general conception of economics—which over time has in turn helped provide space for new institutions and new markets (as Callon and others have documented). That process has often been accompanied by both persuasion and sharp critique, as our strikes show; and the cultural mores I have identified, the powerful voice of lay perspectives must surely be appreciated historically alongside the explicitly anthropological or economic treatment of value and recent forms of marketization that have gained scholarly attention. We must explain the core concepts, rendered newly explicit, but also framing concepts that are much less fully analyzed but bridge different fields, such as economy and mechanism.

This chapter has brought elements of the histories of physics, anthropology, and economics into common perspective by examining diverse accounts of explanation, and examples of explanation in practice, that each engaged concepts of economy: as an explanatory strategy, in the work of Mach and Malinowski, or as subject matter for Malinowski, Knight, and Hayek. In particular, I have illustrated some of the possibilities of beginning to tell the histories of economics and anthropology at the same time, exploring interrelations between them that might ultimately allow us to set both disciplines in motion. Analysts such as Heath Pearson and Gregory have insisted that the primary methods of anthropology and neoclassical economics diverged in this period, with the latter taking an individualistically psychological and deductive approach. Nevertheless, they shared a common culture of discourse and many terms of reference as a result of their mutual examination of organization, social systems, and values. Here I have touched on common tropes, whether closely examined like primitive economical man or comparatively unnoticed like mechanism, in order to suggest points of contact—sometimes contested—in each discipline’s work to establish links between lay and specialist knowledge, often at the expense of the other discipline. Such tropes are particularly powerful because they use social mores to gain disciplinary ground.

A further way of pursuing similar aims would address the relations between economic perspectives and anthropological research in the dimensions of ethnographic practice and publication rather than discourse. I have in mind work establishing the economies of the anthropologist at work—such as Malinowski or Franz Boas paying to elicit stories or written accounts from informants, collaborators, or colleagues like Ibena, who was the chief of Kasana’i village in the Trobriands, and George Hunt of the Tlingit on the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America—and the possibility of setting these thoroughly in conversation with the way they helped build up an anthropological understanding of the Kula ring and potlatch. This would incorporate the question of how the anthropologist gained their knowledge into our studies of primitive economies, as Gregory often does in discussing the unfolding stages of Malinowski’s, Mauss’s, and his own treatments of gifts. For example—to build on Isaiah Wilner’s (2015, 2013) study of the role of the Kwakwaka’wakw people in the development of Boas’s thought—accounting for the mutual demands that Boas and Hunt placed on their relationship might now allow us to bring a further productive term into the brilliant account of the potlatch that Marshall Sahlins used to argue that “the world system is the rational expression of relative cultural logics, that is in the terms of exchange-value” (Sahlins 1988, 8).

But there is one final, more direct implication I would urge on the basis of this study. Recognizing the merely discursive reality of the general concept of the economy, we should unmake it creatively, adopting the lesson of Mach’s economical precision to parse economic activities only through the more specific ways that they have actually found value, whether monetary, measured, or social. We might then speak of GDP and Trobriand gardens but should recognize that the economy does not exist as one thing, but many, differently valued.¹² Indeed, a brilliant exemplification of the conceptual clarity that can be achieved through a renewed, epistemologically economical focus on the elements of economic life has been provided by Anthony Pickles’s (2020) study of “transfers” as the basis for what are normally parsed as the transactional exchanges of gift or market economies.

NOTES

1. 1. The lecture is unpublished, but see also Ingold 2017.

2. 2. For a lively and learned overview of the history of economic anthropology that explores the rich anthropological literature pertinent to this general aim, see Hart 2007.

3. 3. For a brief overview, see Gregory 2000.

4. 4. For excellent studies, see Banks 2003, 180–192; Wegener 2010.

5. 5. For a treatment of Malinowski’s work on the Trobriands as foundational if flawed (from the perspective of formal rather than substantivist approaches to economic anthropology), see LeClair and Schneider 1968, 3–5.

6. 6. The rhetorical strategy helped position him as leading a new approach, but it was already familiar in the Victorian period.

7. 7. Malinowski’s earliest discussions of the relations between magic and the economy prefigure the 1925 account of magic and science that Gregory points to as an alternative to Knight’s account of uncertainty. There Malinowski notes the difference between fishing in the lagoon, where the activity is merely practical and magic is not needed, and fishing on the open sea, fraught with its dangers and calling forth magic. In general, in the same way that Mach had emphasized a similar conception of causation even in low stages of culture, Malinowski regarded “primitive” science as broadly the same as any other science yet also essentially pragmatic and oriented to convenient ends (Gregory 2017, xlix; Malinowski 1974, 31).

8. 8. He drew on perpetual motion in outlining his comparison and emphasized equilibrium phenomena (as Mach did) in both physics and economics: see also Knight (1921) 1933, 11.

9. 9. Heath Pearson has provided an amplified account of Homo economicus, exploring different registers in anthropologists’ and economists’ depictions of the relations between the psychology of economic man and primitive man. His focus on psychology and neglect of the more extended arguments of the anthropologists involved prevents him from giving a reliable understanding of the period; see also the critiques of Ferguson and Gregory: Pearson 2000; Ferguson 2000; Gregory 2000.

10. 10. It is also worth noting that despite his attack on mechanism and physicalist approaches, the historian of economics Philip Mirowski has similarly neglected this period in favor of the 1870s and the post–World War II period; Mirowski 1988, 1989, 2002.

11. 11. See Malinowski (1922) 1961, 59, for the discussion of system.

12. 12. I would like to thank workshop participants, Simon Schaffer, Efram Sera-Shriar, and members of the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine working group Sciences of the Senses, for their careful reading, and the latter for pushing me to this point.

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